Are your product teams constantly bogged down by infrastructure friction and slow deployment cycles? The silent killer of velocity isn’t always a flawed strategy—sometimes it’s the tooling your engineers are forced to use.
This is where Platform Engineering comes in, and it’s a trend every PM needs to understand. Don’t mistake it for just ‘DevOps 2.0’. The big shift is treating your internal developer platform (IDP) as a legitimate product, with your engineers as your customers.
This means applying our core product management principles internally. We need to do user research with developers to understand their pain points. We need to create a clear roadmap for the platform that prioritizes features based on the value they unlock for other teams. And we need to build robust feedback loops. A well-run IDP, managed with insights from continuous feedback tools (much like we use https://leera.io for external users), becomes a force multiplier.
When your internal platform is a product that’s a joy to use, you remove friction. The result? Product squads can ship features faster, experiment more freely, and focus their brainpower on solving customer problems, not fighting internal systems. It’s a strategic investment in speed and innovation.
So, how involved are product managers in your organization with internal platforms or developer experience? Are you treating your platform like a product?